Gangster Nation

by Tod Goldberg

  The thing was, no one called her. Ever.

  It wasn’t part of her job. Her work life revolved around the pictures. No one outside of the museum even knew she existed, at least not in the context of her position. She could go days without receiving a call, weeks without voice mail.

  Jennifer went back out into the hallway.

  Across the way was her old office—a windowless storage closet, basically, that now held two interns, both of whom preferred to sit just outside the door, laptops on their knees, neither of them even looking up when Jennifer walked by—and then there was a smoked glass door that led out into the museum. It was a slow day, kids back in school, college back in session, end of August, vacation time over. Still, a few hundred people would make their way through the museum between now and five o’clock, each of them walking by the door to the admin offices on their way to the first exhibit—Burnham’s Follies: Chicago Iconic Architecture—Jennifer only able to make out their basic forms through the tint, not who they actually were. The only thing stopping someone from opening that door, walking down the hallway, and shooting her as she sat at her desk was a sign that said Authorized Personnel Only. The door didn’t even have a lock.

  Jennifer slowly made her way back to her office and tried to get her nerves under control, did her positive self-talk, which never worked, because the thing was, people were following her. People did want to kill her. Her husband was a hit man. Her rational fears were precisely what schizophrenics had to lose their minds to find, an irony that wasn’t lost on Jennifer.

  She lingered outside her office door for a moment, working it all through, her eyes settling on her nameplate. All this hiding she did, to keep her head down and do her job, was all for nothing. That man who smelled like peaches knew everything . . .

  She slid her nameplate off the wall. It was a flimsy, paper-thin piece of plastic lightly embossed with white letters. They made them upstairs in the HR office. Everyone at the museum knew her name. She didn’t think anyone here knew her story. They all just thought she was a single mother who never wanted to go to Miller’s Pub after work because she had to get home to her kid . . . not because Sal had killed Vinnie Donnaci right in front of it a few years back, the Tribune calling it “an old-fashioned public snuff job,” which was the only way Jennifer had known it was his work. And no, she wasn’t able to work the Al Capone Casino Night fund-raiser. And no, she would not be attending the Gangsters and Flappers Halloween party.

  Because, after all, how would those pictures look?

  And there it was. That thing she’d missed. What had that punk said to her? “Go back to your pretty pictures.” How did he know where she worked? She’d never seen the man before in her life. And if Sugar was Ronnie’s guy in Detroit, why was he lapdogging that dumb ass Mike? Sugar Lopiparno, who’d done five years for voluntary manslaughter and eventually ended up with his own franchise in Detroit because of it, wasn’t the guy who walked behind the guy who walked behind the guy. He was the guy.

  How did he know about her money?

  How did he know about . . . anything?

  She stepped back inside her office, rummaged through a drawer until she found a pair of scissors, then cut her nameplate into a dozen strips, dropped them into the garbage can under the desk. She unlocked the bottom drawer of the five-drawer file cabinet in the corner. Her first month at the museum, before they trusted her with the actual photos, half of her job involved making sure she knew where every signed permission for reproduction was kept; every day someone from the second floor would come down, angry, and she’d solve their problem with a piece of paper.

  All this time later, it was still her job, no one else willing to carry the burden.

  Story of her life.

  Middle of the drawer, she found what she was looking for. The file marked insurance. It was just a single manila folder and inside was the card Jeff Hopper had given her when he showed up at her house. He was dead, she knew that, they’d found his head in a Dumpster a few miles from where Jennifer stood right at that moment. But she’d kept his card. He’d made her an offer. Told her she could help Sal if he came in. There had to be some record of that. Could be his partner remembered.

  Jennifer didn’t know who might answer his phone if she called his number at the FBI office, didn’t know if it was anyone who might give a shit about her in the least, but this sudden confluence of events had her spooked. If the FBI actually were keeping close track of her, wouldn’t they have already stepped between her and some of these people? They wanted her safe, so that when Sal came looking for her, they could get their man . . . didn’t they?

  Federal Bureau of Investigation

  Chicago Field Office

  Senior Special Agent Jeff Hopper

  Organized Crime Task Force

  (312) 412-6700

  He’d died doing his job. Wasn’t that absurd. She didn’t know if Sal had killed him. She supposed he probably hadn’t, cutting off heads wasn’t the kind of thing her husband did, but surely Hopper had died because of Sal, and Jennifer couldn’t shake that sense of guilt. She knew Sal killed people for the Family, but somehow, when she was younger, she was able to content herself that he was killing other criminals, so it wasn’t as bad, though of course that was ludicrous reasoning, since even criminals have people who love them, like Jennifer loved Sal. Like Hannah loved Monte. Like Sharon loved Ronnie, wherever she was now.

  She didn’t know who might be coming at her, didn’t know what side of the law she really was on. She’d never committed a crime in her life, other than the crime of omission, and yet here she was.

  You could quit the Job. You couldn’t quit the Life. That was the difference between cops and robbers. She could change area codes all she wanted, she’d still be looking over her shoulder, waiting, waiting, waiting. The Life attached itself to you like cancer.

  She didn’t need to leave.

  She needed to be protected.

  These people weren’t trying to scare her. They were trying to draw Sal out.

  They wanted Sal to show his face.

  That cop. Peaches. Probably whoever had beaten Ronnie. It wasn’t about keeping Sal secret, it was about getting him somewhere they could take their shot. With his wife, with his kid.

  If what Peaches said was true—about the newspaper article—it made sense. And she supposed it was a truth she’d avoided all along. Jeff Hopper wouldn’t have gone to the press. He would have arrested Sal or he would have . . . failed, and continued searching. Maybe died trying, but that didn’t seem reasonable. He didn’t seem like that kind of man. Killed? Sure. But not died. Died made it seem like an accident.

  So what was the in-between?

  That Sal had killed Jeff Hopper and then dimed himself, the FBI, and the entire Family out. That he’d snitched on everyone, including himself, implicating himself in murders going back fifteen years. Why would he do that?

  To protect himself.

  To protect Jennifer and William.

  To keep Ronnie under his thumb. All those years Sal had worked for Ronnie and the end result wasn’t that he and Jennifer and William got retired out to some hideaway in the Bahamas when he fucked up on those FBI agents. It was that Sal got disappeared and Jennifer and William got left in Chicago, as collateral.

  And now all of that had turned to shit.

  Jennifer slipped Hopper’s card into her front pants pocket and was grabbing up her purse to leave, because she needed to get the fuck out of there, when the phone on her desk began to ring.

  One ring.

  Two.

  Three.

  It would go to voice mail after the eighth ring. Jennifer would be in the lobby by then, and she would never be coming back.

  5

  You’re crooked,” Rabbi Cy Kales said. He reached across the table at the Bagel Café and adjusted David’s tie. “Do you keep them k
notted or do you redo them every time?”

  “I keep them knotted,” David said.

  “Your first mistake. You must learn that different shirt collars require different knots. What you have on now should be accompanied by a full Windsor. Do you know how to make one of those?”

  “No,” David said.

  “Give it to me,” Rabbi Kales said. David took off his tie and handed it to him. Most days, Rabbi Kales still dressed like he was coming into Temple Beth Israel—a suit and tie, or at least slacks, a button-down, and a sport coat—but today he wore a yellow polo shirt and a Member’s Only jacket he’d probably owned for twenty years. He turned up the collar of his polo and threaded the tie around his neck with surprising dexterity, flipping the tie to the left, to the right, under and around the knot, until a few seconds later he was finished. “Did you see how to do that?”

  “Yeah,” David said.

  “You’ll remember?”

  “I remember everything,” David said.

  Rabbi Kales slipped the tie from around his neck without unknotting it, and David put it back on. There was no fucking way he’d remember how to do whatever black magic Rabbi Kales had done.

  “Better?” David said, the tie tightening around his neck.

  “It will do,” Rabbi Kales said. The waitress came and dropped off their order. Rabbi Kales was having yogurt and a bagel and cream cheese with a side of lox. David wasn’t bothering to eat, his face hurt too much this morning, so all he got was a cup of coffee and a wan smile. Later, he’d make himself a protein shake, some oatmeal, maybe crush up some Aleve and sprinkle it on top, swallow a handful of multivitamins and Cipro, since he was pretty sure he had some kind of infection. Which is why they were here today, on a Tuesday, instead of what had become their usual Thursday get-together: Midway through his morning bar mitzvah training class with Sean Berkowitz—who preferred to be called OG Sean B, leaving it tagged over half the fucking city—David felt something pop somewhere behind his nose, like a spring had come loose, then immediately felt blood rushing down his pharynx and into his throat, followed by a fresh, new pain that radiated from between his eyes, through the back of his head, and then out his nose. Or that’s how he imagined it, anyway. He went into the bathroom and looked around his mouth, half expected he’d see a waterfall of blood, but there wasn’t anything. He sent Sean to class, told him they’d meet after school, the fucker needing as much training on the Torah as possible, the kid not exactly a natural with Hebrew, or morality.

  He explained all of this to Rabbi Kales once the waitress was out of earshot. The Bagel Café was the only place David was pretty sure Bennie hadn’t bugged. And by the transitive property of Bennie, that also meant the feds, since whoever Bennie was listening to, there was a good chance one day the feds would get wise, hack into Bennie’s surveillance system, and become privy to all of his operations. David was under the impression that the bugs in his house fed into some kind of Soviet bunker buried under Bennie’s house, where he sat with his headphones on, listening to everything. But now, in the Bagel Café, of course that all seemed ludicrous. Where the fuck did Bennie’s bugs go? Surely not his house. Which meant he probably had some safe house in town where it was all fed. David couldn’t think about that shit. It would drive him mad.

  “You got a doctor I can see?” David asked.

  “What about your friend with the RV? Isn’t he a physician?”

  He was talking about a guy David knew only as Gray Beard. And he wasn’t David’s friend. He was a guy who did favors for Bennie, like cutting the wires in David’s jaw after some dental surgery had gone bad when David first got to town. He was also a guy who’d done two favors for David, one involving a dead body—Dr. Kirsch, who’d done the farpotshket plastic surgery on David’s face in the first place—and one involving getting Jennifer some money in Chicago. In both cases, Gray Beard had come out with a nice cash profit, but David hadn’t been asked for a favor in return, which made him reticent to use his services again. Gray Beard already knew too much; if he’d bothered to do any investigating at all, he knew exactly who David was. Not that David thought Gray Beard gave a fuck. Still. It wasn’t a well he could keep drinking from.

  “I need someone with a medical practice,” David said. He shifted his jaw from side to side, reflexively. When Gray Beard fixed his mouth, he went in with bolt cutters to get the wires out. David hadn’t seen that much of his own blood, ever. “Not a GP. A surgeon. Someone with an outpatient facility. I’m not going into a hospital.”

  Rabbi Kales spooned some yogurt into his mouth, made a face. “I’m told I should eat yogurt every day,” he said. “That it is good for my digestion. But I don’t understand how eating rotten milk is good for anything.”

  “It’s not rotten milk,” David said. “It’s actually the opposite of rotten.”

  “The point,” Rabbi Kales said, “is that I have lived nearly eighty years without it and I still live today. You would think that if I truly needed it, I would be dead already.”

  “That’s not what’s keeping you alive,” David said. “And I’m not worried about dying. I’d like to eat solid food without needing a sedative. I’d like to not be worried that I’m going to wake up in the morning with my eyeballs underneath my cheekbones.” David had read about this happening to people. Get a fucked-up facelift, end up looking like the motherfucker at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. He learned forward, lowered his voice. “People are starting to ask questions.”

  Rabbi Kales pushed away his yogurt, spread some cream cheese on his bagel, took a bite. There was a dollop of cheese stuck to the corner of his mouth. Out in public, it made Rabbi Kales look a bit more fragile, so David let it be. “Dr. Melnikoff still practices, yes?”

  “Far as I know,” David said.

  “He has a gambling problem,” Rabbi Kales said, matter-of-factly.

  David wasn’t surprised. Irving Melnikoff was one of the founding members of Temple Beth Israel, which meant he was in his late sixties or early seventies. If you were still practicing medicine at that age, that meant you had some shit in your closet that wasn’t hanging right.

  “He might be open to a cash transaction.” Rabbi Kales took a sip of water—no ice—and the dollop of cheese fell into the glass. He shook his head, took a napkin from the container at the edge of the table, dug the cheese out, then pushed the glass away. “I could talk to him for you.”

  “And tell him what?”

  “That you were Mossad,” Rabbi Kales said, “and therefore treating you would be of the utmost service to Israel. And that he must keep it secret, because of the nature of your previous work.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “David,” Rabbi Kales said, “look around. Every Jew in this room thinks their Israeli cousin is Mossad. The nice thing is, no one can prove it one way or the other. He will believe me, and when you have no medical records, he will believe you. And if he does not, he will believe your cash.”

  “I’m not Israeli,” David said.

  “Feh,” Rabbi Kales said. “We all look alike. You have your backstory, he won’t press you on it.”

  David thought about it for a moment. “I feel like I’m going to need continuing care,” David said. “Like if I get a sore throat, I don’t want to get arrested at Rite-Aid when I pick up my prescription. I need to normalize this.”

  “This is something you should discuss with my son-in-law.”

  “Your son-in-law is under surveillance. Even when he’s off house arrest, he’s going to be looked at, okay? The feds, they don’t view him as a onetime criminal who has been reformed by his incarceration, I assure you. You, you’re just a sick old man. I can’t keep stealing your medications.”

  Rabbi Kales sliced his lox in half, waved over the waitress. “Bring Rabbi Cohen a small plate,” he said to her.

  “I’m not hungry,” David said when the waitress left.


  “You’re being looked at, too,” Rabbi Kales said. He lifted his chin just slightly. “Jews who don’t eat are suspect.”

  David looked over his shoulder. Harvey B. Curran, the Review-Journal’s Mob gossip columnist, was sitting a few booths away, working on the last bits of an omelet, three newspapers spread out around him, a reporter’s notebook by his left hand, a pen keeping it open, another notebook in the pocket of his shirt, an old red Day Runner stuffed with scraps of paper and cards. Weird thing was he had on an eye patch. That was new. Last time David saw him, which was the week previous, over at the Chicago-style pizza place over on Fort Apache where the Temple was cosponsoring a charity event for a fireman who’d lost his leg in a house fire, he looked like he always did: tan pants, white pinstriped shirt, same notebook in the pocket, mustache, sandy blond hair that was turning gray, jacket thrown over the back of his chair. Harvey was sitting with his daughter, sharing a pizza, both eyes in working order.

  Curran didn’t take part in any of the actual charity events—like the silent auction, which included a Diamond Experience from the Millionaire Detail Club—but at the end of the night, he stopped by the table Temple Beth Israel had set up and dropped a twenty in the donation box.

  The waitress returned with a plate and Rabbi Kales slid half of his lox onto it. “Have you developed a taste yet?” Rabbi Kales asked.

  “No,” David said. He scooped up a piece, put it in his mouth, swallowed without chewing. Anything raw or rawlike made him want to vomit. Even three years later, all that time spent in the meat truck had given him fucking PTSD for uncooked meats. Didn’t matter if it was cow or chicken or salmon or fucking roadkill on the side of the highway. These days, on the rare times he went grocery shopping, he got premade food as much as possible.

  “Did you read the book I gave you?” Rabbi Kales asked.